I feel compelled to raise my hand and admit that I’m partly to blame. I’m no more to blame than everyone else on the Senior Auditor’s ad-hoc working group, but no less. If we’d realized that Basil had infiltrated the DRESDEN RICE committee—hell, if it had occurred to us that our mole might come in the guise of an elderly, low-level administrative employee—we might have paid more attention to reducing the threat surface of the working group. But he’d been working his mind-fogging magic within our halls since before I was born. He predates the Senior Auditor; he was certainly here during the organization’s salad days as part of SOE during the Second World War. He predates Angleton. He was a careful planner, and although he operated at a relatively low level he had access to all our non-current HR files and declassified internal records. Consequently he got inside our event loop, with fatal consequences.

While we thought we were very cleverly mousetrapping our adversary at an off-site location of our choice, our adversary was simultaneously mousetrapping our away team . . . and tricking his oldest, deadliest enemy into a suicidal assault on the New Annex, promoted by a trickle of cunning lies and assisted by the loan of a warrant card, keys, and a floor plan.

Actually, this had been on the cards for a very long time. Months, certainly; possibly for years, maybe even for decades. After all, the first rule of vampires is, vampires don’t exist, and the elders take its enforcement as a matter of deadly importance. So a corollary of this rule is that any viable strategy for eliminating an old and powerful rival is going to be non-obvious.

There are a couple of long-term survival strategies open to the occult practitioner who has let the wrong symbiote in. One of these is to hunker down and squat, invisible, in the center of a miasmic mist of misleading magic that befuddles and bamboozles anybody who speculates about your existence. The leading proponent of this strategy, the strategy of the hedgehog, was the late Basil Northcote-Robinson, and it served him well—up to a point.

The other leading strategy is to turn the PHANGs’ ability to compel belief to the accretion of wealth and power, and to use those accumulated assets to build a pearl, layering protective nacre around your sand-grain heart. This strategy, the strategy of the fox, is the one that Old George Stephenson employed. What kind of vampire elder owns a founder’s stake in one of the nation’s largest investment banks? Answer: one who is not afraid to take risks in the pursuit of profit.